The Open Compute project The Natixis bank’s data center in Marne-La-Vallée supplies water at 55 °C to heating systems in an area undergoing urban development and to the local Val d’Europe water sports center. The Open Compute project was launched by Facebook in 2011, in association with Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim; HP, Dell, Cisco, Apple and Microsoft have now joined the movement. The project and its foundation aim to design, use and promote the distribution of the most effective and adaptable computing and storage solutions for infrastructures. Contributions to the project must meet these 4 criteria: performance, scalability, access and impact. Several European initiatives are currently underway that are designed to support the European cloud industry; these would need to be coordinated with open hardware and open software initiatives in order to reinforce the European market’s confidence in cloud. The European cloud initiative could prove useful here, and such an approach would allow an increase in the influence of European stakeholders by increasing their share in the market and their presence in discussions concerning standardization. 4. Releasing Ecological Data AI is opening up radically new perspectives in terms of understanding and preserving the environment. Whether it is employed in the identification and preservation of biodiversity, the remedying of damage that has already been caused, the modelling of the impact of our actions, the most efficient use of resources, the harnessing of sources of renewable energy or else as a tool for use by shared services, AI can contribute to a reduction in general consumption and can boost all our initiatives towards respecting AI is opening up radically and restoring regional and global ecosystems. new perspectives in terms From reforestation using drones to the mapping of of understanding and living species using new possibilities furnished by image recognition, AI can supply a growing preserving the number of increasingly powerful tools to enable us environment to fully engage in the process of ecological transition. How can we take full advantage of this to support France’s reputation in the field of ecology? Which initiatives should be prioritized? Two initiatives appear to take precedence: the creation of sets of data which would cross-reference various sources, including genetic, and be available to as many people as possible— researchers, innovation leaders, State-owned start-ups, etc.—and supporting specific objectives. We are putting forward two more: reducing our carbon footprint through greater transport efficiency, and French agriculture’s transition towards a more intelligent and less polluting form of agriculture. These two objectives could thus be embodied in specific sector-based policies, along the lines of those described in Part 1. These challenging sector-based proposals are raised in the 108